The future of energy

The questions on the credibility of crude oil for the world.

Oil is the number one source of energy in the world and has held this place since the middle of the twentieth century. The world is very dependent on oil for transportation fuels, petrochemicals and asphalt. The ever increasing demand has caused the price to spike in recent years and only the world economic crisis has been able to temper demand and bring the price down to more reasonable levels. Once the economy recovers, the demand and price are likely to shoot up again. At the same time, the peak oil theory of King Hubbert predicts that world oil production is likely to peak soon, and this will place even more upward pressure on the price of oil.

The theories of Hubbert have garnered a lot of credibility after his successful prediction of the rise and fall of oil production in the United States. His prediction, however, that world oil production would peak in 2000 and fall rapidly after that has not proven true. Nineteen years later, world oil production continues to rise according to the demands of the world

economy. Despite evidence to the contrary, Hubbert’s theories still have a lot of support and many people still expect that oil production is about to peak and will fall rapidly in the immediate future. They then expect that the world will be starved of energy and resource wars will follow that will plunge the world into a bitter struggle for control of the remaining resources that are rapidly depleting. Oil is a finite resource, and there is no denying the fact that at some point world oil production will peak and at some point in the distant future we will run out of it altogether.

In the upcoming blog post you will see that the world still has plenty of oil and that, if and when it does eventually peak, it will not decline as rapidly as Hubbert predicts...